Courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures
Excuse me, but when did Antlers from producer Guillermo Del Toro and Hostiles director Scott Cooper come out, even?!
Suddenly it was there on the HBO Max app’s new releases row like it was nothing, but I don’t remember it coming to theaters. And I would have known, too, because Cooper’s horror flick based on a short story by writer Nick Antosca stars Kerri Russell (from the phenomenal show The Americans) and Breaking Bad alum Jesse Plemons (who just got an Oscar nom for Power of the Dog, btw). I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time in that I enjoy mediocre horror sometimes, no joke, but now that I’ve seen Antlers? Meh. It’s fine. A little less than fine, honestly—more problematic than fine, really, and the type of horror movie that would have been a lot more popular in the early aughts.
In Antlers, we join 12-year-old Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), a super-weird super-weirdo living in rural Oregon whose teacher (Russell) notices he does scary illustrations and looks sad all the time and probably has a creepy secret. She, too, has a creepy secret, and decides she’ll help the lad. Good thing her brother (Plemons) is the sheriff, then, though he, like most other characters in the film, mostly stands around talking about the things he can’t do rather than the things he can. He also might have an opiate addiction in a clumsy parallel to the Russell character’s alcoholism.
Bodies pile up in the woods and Lucas reads books about what it’s like to be friends with demons. Everything is dark.
Turns out Lucas’ dad and brother are sick in a way the film leads us to believe might be based in Indigenous folklore. I shan’t name the creature elicited here (it starts with a W if you absolutely must know, but I’ve learned that it’s not a word one should use), just know that it’s not good news for Lucas, his family or anyone else hanging around their crummy little town. Ruh-roh.
Cooper seems to be going for an “addiction is rough,” allegory here, which is of course very true, but he doesn’t touch on the actual implications or fallout of such issues in any noticeable way. And that’s at-best. At worst, he’s saying what? That people struggling with addiction are monsters? Or that addiction itself makes addicts do monstrous things? So can the stone-cold sober. So what?
Additionally, and similarly to his 2017 Western Hostiles, Cooper brings in a talented Native actor (Graham Greene in this case) to drop a couple lines that educate the white folks, then it’s back to not really being a part of anything. This seems to have become a pattern for the writer/director (Wes Studi’s relegation to silent background guy for most of Hostiles felt really unfortunate), and Greene does what he can with very little. Russell and Plemons, meanwhile, deliver ham-fisted lines about how it was hard to be kids and how Lucas mostly just makes people uncomfortable—but they should probably help him anyway.
You, the viewer, see everything coming from a mile away, right up to the non-ending whereupon Cooper fails not only to address his unfortunate erasure and appropriation of Native mythology, it’s just really damn hard to care.
5
+Thomas is solid; Greene is always awesome
-Feels appropriation-y; stretches of tedium
Antlers
Directed by Cooper
With Thomas, Russell, Plemons and Greene
HBO Max, R, 99 min.
